


bite around the bruises

by sunflashes



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-01
Updated: 2012-09-01
Packaged: 2017-11-13 07:19:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/500913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflashes/pseuds/sunflashes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He throws her to the heavens. </p><p>Talia, his little girl, his <i>pequeña</i>, he opens his arms and lets her go, and it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bite around the bruises

He throws her to the heavens.

 

Talia, his little girl, his  _pequeña_ , he opens his arms and lets her go, and it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done.

 

She’s everything beautiful forged from everything awful and she looks down at him with those magnetic eyes and he only has time to whisper  _goodbye_  before he’s dragged down into the maelstrom of vicious hands.

 

He chokes on his own blood and feels pieces of his skin rip away, but he waits.  He retreats deep within himself and waits, because it all will be worth it if Talia makes it. 

 

He is inundated with the pain of it, the intimate brutality of starving, hollowed men. He writhes amid their clawed fingers and clubbed fists, their primitive blades and stone weights.  He bleeds and he waits and he hears his bones break and suddenly everyone isn’t looking at him anymore.

 

He is dumped unceremoniously onto the stone floor and he cries out at the harsh contact.  He hears the muttering, the skittish murmurs of the hesitant.

 

“ _Deshi deshi basara basara_ …” they intone over and over, a low, pulsing rhythm, and his heart pounds. He can’t move, he’s fairly certain that even craning his neck to look could be fatal.  He is imagining hundreds of horrible, fatal mistakes. He is sobbing, hoping with all he has that he will never have to hear the crush of that pretty, fragile skull as it plummets to the stone floor.  He closes his eyes and waits and the pain takes him apart more completely than he had ever imagined possible. 

 

“ _Deshi deshi basara basara_ …” They repeat. The mantra grows louder, it cuts into his ears and shakes through the rough stone beneath him. He is mad, delirious with pain as a pool of blood blossoms forth from his mouth. “ _Deshi deshi basara basara_!” the prisoners scream, feral and raw.

 

She has reached the jump, he knows it in his  _bones_ to be true, and the screaming, wild chant breaks abruptly for a devastating second.

 

He draws a breath and listens for the sound of his nightmares, Talia’s fragile bird spine against harsh, cold stone.

 

But they cheer.

 

They cheer and he lets his breath out in a whisper into the blood pouring from his face.

 

“Rise,  _pequeña_.”

 

\---

 

“And you, what is your name?” R’as al Ghul asks him, kneeling down to meet his eyes.

 

“I had a name once,” he says, hazy and muffled by the cloths and bandages.  “It has long since left me.”

 

“Are you the one who saved my daughter, Talia al Ghul?” R’as leans in closer to the bandaged man and abruptly recoils; the smell of the herbs and infected flesh repulses him.

 

“I was her protector, yes.” The man looks up at him with sharp dark eyes and answers, words soft, slurred with feeling through the bandages.

 

“Then you are to come with me.”

 

\---

 

The moment Talia sees him, even with the mask her father made obscuring his nose and mouth, she recognizes him. 

 

She runs to him, calls him  _my friend_  and will not leave his lap and the safety of his arms even though her childhood has long passed. His hands settle at the top of the slight curve of her waist as though they had never left.

 

“ _Pequeña_ ,” He whispers into her hair, but it sounds artificial and choked to his own ears.

 

“My friend, you have been hurt so cruelly… but still you love me.” Talia cradles his face in her hands, beautiful slender fingers a sharp contrast to the scarred skin of his cheeks. “What have I done to deserve you?” She laughs and pulls his head to her chest. He can hear her heart racing and she laughs again. It is not the carefree, sweet laugh coaxed from a scared child but the weary, desperate almost-sigh of a woman who has seen too much.

 

“You deserve far better than this.” He says quietly, the mouthpiece of the mask resting just below her clavicle.

 

“Don’t you ever say that again.” Talia pulls his chin up sharply and locks their gazes, cold blue eyes staring, unabashedly and without inhibition, into brown ones molten with pain and rage.  “Don’t ever.”

 

He does not say anything, but he sees the thorns amid her beauty.

 

\---

 

It is obvious to him that R’as al Ghul sees him as Talia’s weakness.  R’as watches him predatorily every time Talia gets near him.

 

It is not until six months after they rescued him that R’as al Ghul starts trying to kill him.

 

It starts with accidents and almost ends with poison.

 

He falls to his knees, limbs heavy and chest tight, during a sparring match, and Talia runs to his side.

 

“Leave the monster be.” R’as lays a commanding, firm hand on his daughter’s shoulder and she slaps it away.

 

“What did you do?” She whispers as the man’s breathing grows ragged and harsh. He lists to the side and collapses and she turns, full of rage, to face her father. “What did you  _do_!”

 

Talia strikes him over and over again, raining blows upon him that he can only deflect and parry.  She slips past his defenses and brings her own father to his knees.

 

“What did you give to him,” She pants, furious, knee to her R’as’ throat, poised to crush his windpipe. The man on the ground behind her has mere moments left.

 

The disciples of the League of Shadows are silent and stunned. 

 

“ _Wolfsbane_ ,” R’as chokes out and Talia bears down with her knee for a blindingly painful instant before letting him go sprinting to the apothecary.

 

\---

 

Talia tries to coax him back to health and christens him Bane.

 

“You must master what has hurt you the most,” She croons, dragging her fingers over the barely palpable stubble on his scalp. Bane’s head is resting in her lap and he can hear her father’s ideals strong in her sweet voice like an infection, decaying her from the core outwards.

 

Bane had hoped she would stay forever as she had been when he first knew her, righteous and fiery-sweet, a headstrong and clever girl. He knows this was too much to hope for as he gazes up at her now. He sees a warrior, he sees an iron-willed, beautiful, utterly deadly  _force of nature_.

 

And then she looks down at him, meets his gaze and smiles, and she is a girl again. She sees him so plainly, loves him so dearly, that she can’t be anything but his and he hers.

 

She is an apple with the bruises of her father’s doomsday promises sunken into her. Leave the bruises behind, bite around them, and only goodness remains.  

 

This disparity will grow harsher.

 

Bane will let Talia whisper her wishes low and sweet into his ears as they lay twined together, her naked skin honey-slick and soft in the candlelight. He will build bombs for her and wrap them in silken ribbon. He will burn bodies and murder mercenaries and collapse cities and mutate further into the monster R’as al Ghul may have been right about all along, but he will do it for Talia, because there is no love without pain.

 

There is no suffering without hope. 


End file.
